How to Have iPhone or iPad Read Emails To You & Speak to Write Back

Want to have your emails read to you? How about talking to write out a reply rather than poking around on the touch screen? You can easily do both in iOS, so the next time you need to read and write emails while you’re on the go or driving, consider using the awesome text-to-speech and Dictation features on the iPhone and iPad.

won’t it mess up with the way we use the iPad/iPhone? since the feature is not developed for that usage, it’s a feature to help visually impaired user to use the device. i attempted to turn it on and try to adjust my self, but it’s more of a cumbersome than useful. since it is possible to read out the text, maybe Apple can be more “aware” of the voice user interface. the dictation is a good start.

Just experimented with this. If there ever was a time for people to use proper grammar in their message composition, this is it.

The AI understands periods as stops. It understands commas as split-second pauses. It even understands question marks and exclamation marks as points of inflection (definite up-turn on questions, slightly more emphasis on exclamation points). What it does NOT understand, however, is a double space after periods (something that was eliminated from composition with the death of the typewriter and monospace type).

It does very well at “taking a breath” on spaced, or paragraphed, sentences. What it doesn’t do well at, for obvious reasons, are run-on sentences and huge swaths of words and sentences without a degree of separation. I have a feeling this is going to be a major issue for a large percentage of people online, who routinely practice word-vomit, especially on forums as flaming replies to postings.

The dictation, though, is going to be another matter entirely. We may be “here for a bit”.

I couldn’t find an app that works well for reading out email so I wrote one. Check out http://www.speaking.email if you are interested in this kind of thing. It’s much better when you have an app that is specifically designed for the task. It has gestures to skip, archive, star etc also – which you just can’t do with VoiceOver or Siri.